It really has no relevant meaning, originally meant as a project name only. The team voted for it from a few candidates (alternatives were "nom", "alda", "mmt", "yummy", "yum4" and my personal favorite "rpe"). If DNF is not acceptable for a good reason there is still time to rename it.

Please don't rename yum if you are working with yum developers and modifying it to be better, faster or whatever. readopting to some non-acryonym like DNF after years of muscle memory is going to very disruptive. Users don't care about internal changes and shouldn't have to. Just continue calling it yum and save us all the trouble.

One thing we know is it can not be called "yum", because then the python package would clash with the current yum and the two need to coexist. You can bind a shell alias for now and if the current yum becomes obsoleted I will provide /usr/bin/yum directed to dnf.

There are still several unanswered questions and I recommend updating the feature page directly for these. Are you working with the current yum developers? Why are you forking and why would they need to co-exist? How does this compare to zif? Why dnf instead of a prounancable name like yum? will you be using the existing yum.conf file and command line arguments, fully compatible with yum? Have you talked to PackageKit and Anaconda developers?

Yes, I am working with the yum developers. The main reason for fork is that it would be very hard to integrate libsolv (through hawkey or not) to yum without breaking its API clients, and while maintaining everything else working. Second, DNF departs from some of yum APIs that were painful to use for other components (Anaconda, PackageKit, plugins). It will take at least Fedora 18 for DNF to become stable enough and to migrate the most often used yum plugins. IOW, the DNF version planned to be shipped with Fedora 18 will really be a preview only. DNF will use /etc/dnf/dnf.conf with the same format as yum.conf. Repo configuration is shared with yum, at least for now. I aim for maximal CLI compatibility between DNF and yum, though not full set of commands will be supported yet.

I notified the PackageKit maintainer about those plans and I will be helping with DNF integration to Anaconda when the time comes.

For me, DNF stands for Disjunctive Normal Form (a way of simplyfing boolean operations), and it's also almost a homophone of DNS (e.g. over a bad phone line), so I feel that it's a poor choice of name. If all you need is a codename, you could pick a town in Massachusetts (e.g. Dracut, Wayland, etc), or a rejected codename from a previous Fedora release (it's presumably already been through Legal).
--Dmalcolm 18:33, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

DNF is unprounancable and other than what Dmalcolm mentions also stands for a few more unfortunate things like Did Not Finish or Duke Nukem Forever. Even if it is a temporary project name, it should be changed IMO